


Escape from New York

by FromFanToStan



Category: One Direction (Band), zayn malik - Fandom
Genre: Feels, Harry is weak for Zayn, Light Angst, M/M, Mostly Harry’s, Post-Canon, Zayn at the Farm AU, Zayn is in control, zarry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-24 17:35:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21103325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FromFanToStan/pseuds/FromFanToStan
Summary: Harry gets drunk, runs into Gigi, and because she's drunk too and says Zayn misses him, impulsively drives out to the farm to see him. That's it, really.TW: this Harry is pretty unhappy. I have no reason to believe RL Harry is anything of the sort. It's fiction, an AU where Zayn is healthy and healed, away from the madness of stardom, and Harry is still caught in its clutches. It's all very rural romantic, I'm afraid.





	Escape from New York

The slowing of the limo awakens Harry. He has a minute to sit up and notice the desert of his dehydrated post-drinking mouth and the slight pounding at his temples that remind him of just exactly how much he drank last night. He grimaces; he hates New York and compensates by drinking his aggravation away. 

The limo driver enters the key code at Zayn's gate, and suddenly the gate is swinging inward and they are moving up the gravel drive, the two story clapboard house just visible in the distance. Harry rolls down the window and sticks his aching head outside. The sky here in western Pennsylvania is pink and clear, so it's early; he can see that a light breeze stirs the trees on the edges of clearings and on growing corn stalks. He can hear the slight sound of the movement of water in the river he knows is nearby. The breeze carries the faint smell of mud and diesel fuel. 

He had expected to have a while, maybe all morning, to drink water out of the bottles in the mini frig in the back of the limo, to wake up, hydrate, decide what to say, since Zayn would no doubt not be up before noon, but instead there’s Zayn on the porch, barefoot, in pajama bottoms and a white henley, hair mussed and long, scratching his neck. Through the screen Harry can see lamplight pooled on the arm of a well worn sofa, an end table, the chipped handle of a blue coffee mug. Zayn was already up, thwarting Harry’s expectations, and he is wrong-footed and awkward and tongue-tied. So, nothing has changed after five years.

He stumbles out of the limo, telling the driver, whose name he suddenly, brilliantly, remembers is Chris, to wait until he sees whether or not he’ll be welcome. He doesn’t look at Zayn yet. It’s way more important to get to the porch without falling down since he is apparently still a little drunk. He cannot make himself even more of a fool after not seeing Zayn for five years. He can’t, and so he doesn’t. He has a foot on the first step of the porch before he looks up and into Zayn’s sleepy gaze.

“Gigi texted that you were probably on your way.”

“He’d love to see you!” Gigi had slurred. “Sometimes when he was really high he used to admit how much he missed you.”

Harry had been drunk too, and it was a fact that his decisions when intoxicated were always joyous but rarely wise. Some six hours later his hired limo had pulled into Zayn’s drive just like that, key code helpfully provided by a drunk Gigi in response to Harry’s drunken confession that he had missed Zayn too. It was so easy, when you were rich, to just do things without planning or really thinking. It was so easy to run to, or away. Just like that. Like you knew what you were doing.

Harry waits, his foot poised on the step, ready to turn and go or follow Zayn into the house. He can’t read Zayn’s expression or his body language. In the band he had always known when Zayn was uncomfortable; his shoulders would tense slightly and his lips would purse while he looked first down and then away. In those days Harry knew to reach for him, that touch would pull Zayn back into the moment, and that Harry’s touch especially would be anchoring. It always made him feel useful to Zayn in a way he didn’t feel he was to anyone else. But this Zayn’s body and face look relaxed and contained. He doesn’t know this man who is finally speaking.

“I never said goodbye to you. I felt bad about it, but then…” Zayn shrugs an elegant shoulder, looks down at the ground, in the way he has. Harry forces himself to take the two steps up and onto the porch. He has Zayn in his nose now, his unique blend of cigarettes and the slightly oily smell of his skin, the spice peculiarly his. They used to burrow into each other’s sides, confident in the welcome there, knowing that they liked each other’s smell and feel. Harry wants to bury his nose in Zayn’s neck. It is so good to see him. Terrifying, deeply uncomfortable, but so good.

“I cried the night it was announced,” Harry says finally. Zayn looks up for a moment, winces, and then looks away again. Harry continues, because who knows when, if ever, he’ll have this chance again. It is Zayn, it was always Zayn who knew him the best. He shouldn’t be here but inexplicably is. He plows ahead.

“At first I was busy, finishing up things with the band, and then there was the movie, that was exciting and flattering to be chosen, and then the album, and the tour, but….” Now it’s Harry’s turn to shrug and look down. He doesn’t know how to say the next part out loud, and instead he looks out into the gathering dawn in this alien landscape. 

He can hear the stirrings of the chickens in the henhouse, soft snorts and snuffles from the various barns. Zayn lives here; he really lives here. Somehow Harry has imagined him hanging out on a sofa, playing video games, or graffiti painting the walls. There are crops, though; their leaves rustle from all directions. He takes a deep breath.

“I’m not happy. I’ve not been since the tour ended.”

Zayn looks at him then, his expressive eyes questioning, and now Harry has his complete attention. Zayn opens his mouth, inhales as though he will speak, but then closes it again. He shakes his head slightly as he used to do when he didn't know how to respond to Harry being honest in this particular way. He thinks, Z_ayn won't be able to be mad at me when I'm honest. He never could. _

“I know what it looks like. But it’s not real. I don’t care about anything I’m doing or anyone I’m with. I don’t like what I’ve done for the new album. It’s very pop. Very streaming friendly.” He grimaces. "It's not where I was hoping to go, but Jeff says that in a year or two it'll all be streaming, all singles, and I had to establish myself in that market. He was right, I mean, I did do that. I've got great streaming numbers off the new album, but I don't like it that much. I was prouder of my first."

Harry trips over the words like he so often trips on stage, his mind ahead of his body. “I don’t like to go home, because Mum knows. Gemma knows. Grimmy took one look at me the last time I saw him and said, ‘Oh, poor little pop star. You’re pathetic.’ I haven’t spoken to him since.”

Zayn’s fingers move against his side. Harry thinks maybe Zayn will touch him, hug him even. But he hugs himself instead.

Harry can see that Zayn is considering how to respond, and for a moment he regrets everything, all the distance between two boys who whispered their secrets and two men who guard every word. He blinks back a tear that has arrived like an unexpected and unwelcome guest. He waits for Zayn to figure out how to be diplomatic. To be kind. He wants to be annoyed, waiting, but instead he's just hopeful. Pathetic, like Grimmy said.

“Do you feel like, ah, you’re making the decisions? That, like, they’re coming from your heart? Because you always had a big heart, Harry.”

The words _are_ kind, and Harry doesn’t know in the moment if he’s grateful for or angered by them. He knows, he thinks he knows anyway, what Zayn is saying.

“I’d be happy if I were, is that what you think, Z? I was never like you, all sure of myself. No one ever got that I was the insecure one.” He softens his voice, afraid suddenly that he’s forgetting the years and the distance, that he’s talking to Zayn like they’re still Haz and Z. They’re nobody to each other any more. “You always knew your own mind even if you didn’t always know what to do about it.”

“I still don’t know, Haz,” Zayn admits, and Harry is so glad to hear the old nickname, to let it sail him back to those over-sweet shots and anonymous rooms after the crazy mayhem of a show. He loses himself for a minute, forgets that he’s still standing on a porch in Pennsylvania, since he and Zayn could always be Haz and Z anywhere.

“But it’s good, being out here?”

“Yeah, mostly. It’s real work. It feels good to move my body without thinking about what it looks like.” They laugh a little, for a second, before a silence falls and Harry dares a quick glance to take in the man who once was his best friend. More than his friend.

Harry knows that he’s considered handsome, sexy, desirable, but he’s never been particularly vain. He also knows his looks are changeable, that he can appear beautiful when he dresses right and has the right hair and the right light, on stage, always, but he looks at the pap pics and the fan selfies, and he knows that when he’s on the way to the gym or out for brekkie with a friend or just barely up in the morning, if he weren’t famous he’d just be a guy no one paid particular attention to, just a reasonably attractive and moderately tall guy that you’d have to look at twice to notice the ways he’s good-looking. 

But _ Zayn_. Exhausted, painfully thin, wearing gym shorts and a ratty Ramones tee, stoned, barely awake, in the glare of Klieg lights or bright sun, at dusk or dawn, he is always eerily beautiful. Harry has never looked at him and not lost his breath. He pities the weight of Zayn’s looks. He can never disappear. In the dawn light of his own porch, he glows, and Harry notices that he’s bigger, muscular in a way he’s never been, tan and strong-looking. He’s not pretty anymore--he’s a stunning _ man_. 

Harry feels ugly, suddenly, with his rumpled party clothes and bad breath and red eyes. He’s been partying too much, and he’s suddenly aware of it. He feels ashamed of how indulgent he’s been lately, a product of the unhappiness he carries around with him most of the time. Zayn looks better than he’s ever looked, and here he’s been imagining him ill, unhappy, alone. If he hadn’t, he probably wouldn’t have been able to come.

Harry waits for a minute as it becomes awkward to be standing so still and quiet on the porch, as though Zayn expects him to leave any second, but they are still in tune, perhaps, because Zayn seems to have the same thought. He gestures vaguely at the open door, the soft lamplight of the room inside, the Arabic rug on polished hardwood. He can see that the room is orderly and quiet, like Zayn himself.

“Come in, Harry. I have coffee on. I’ll make you a cup. Still just black?” And then when Harry nods and moves to follow, “I don’t have much time before I have to start on chores. Animals, ya know.”

Harry doesn’t. He never stays anywhere long enough for a pet; somehow the peripatetic life they lived as band mates had made him always restless, always looking ahead to the next place, always fearing boredom, while it made Zayn long to burrow into a nest of home. Why did he come? 

He and Zayn have always been so different, but he still feels the pull toward him, the same as the day they met, this sense that Zayn is important that persisted through the bitterness and the betrayal. He hates how vulnerable he is, still, and how little Zayn’s face betrays. Suddenly he has to know.

“I’ve missed you. Have you missed me?”

“Of course,” Zayn answers easily, as though Harry has asked if he can use the toilet, “Every day. Maybe more since Gigi and I—you know, whatever. I keep my body busy but my mind goes where it wants. Sometimes it’s to the past. I would do things differently if I had them to do over.”

And this, Harry thinks, is as close to an apology that he’ll ever get from Zayn. He can offer more. Harry always offers more.

“I’m sorry I didn’t understand better what you were trying to tell me then, about how much you were suffering. I was tired all the time, we all were. We were at our worst, I think. I hope. I’d do things differently too.” Harry pushes on. “I was a mess, Z.”

Harry knows that Zayn was angry at him, that he hated the way he'd been flippant in interviews, the way he acted on stage, after. He was angry, then, too. But they're still the same people underneath, surely. They can’t have changed that much, even though they haven’t spoken in years. He never admits it, but he listens to Zayn’s music all the time. You might say he studies it for clues, has done since before the band imploded, for evidence of how Zayn really feels.

Zayn’s voice is gentle. “It’s alright, Haz. It’s in the past.”

“Should I send the driver away for a bit? Do you want me to stay a while?” In his mind, Harry wills him to say yes and then waits as Zayn pauses before replying.

“Yeah, that might be nice. Maybe he could go into town, to West Mifflin? That way if we come to blows you wouldn’t have to wait long for him to come get you.”

Harry opens his mouth to protest when he sees that Zayn is grinning at him.

The coffee mugs are long emptied and washed; this too is different. Zayn offered Harry a shower and a clean toothbrush and pair of track pants, which he now wears, while Zayn went out to the barns. Horses are now in the paddock, and Harry can hear the distant bleating of goats on the edges of clearings. A cow moos, chickens cluck. Otherwise, Harry hasn’t heard anything since Zayn’s hired hand, he laughingly calls him, arrived in an old Ford F-150 and takes Zayn’s instructions for the day. Harry peers out the window from his place on the sofa, surprised to find that he feels a twinge of jealousy at the tall, muscular blonde man who is apparently Zayn’s right hand man. He’s good-looking too, isn’t he? And young, maybe 18. Harry feels at least forty today. 

Still, as he runs a finger idly over the sofa back, waiting for Zayn, he feels a tension drain from his body that he hadn’t known he was holding, and then Zayn is back, in the overstuffed armchair next to the sofa where Harry sits, his socked feet tucked under him, work boots on the porch, in worn jeans and a white tee that show newly broadened shoulders and toned biceps. He has a new calm about him too that seems free of the sulkiness Harry remembers. Of all of them, Louis and Zayn had been the moody ones. It was at least part of why the two were close. And yet, still, in spite of this calmness about him, Harry is surprised at how quickly he and Zayn find a rhythm, how easy it is to talk.

“No one laughs at my jokes, or if they do, it’s unkind. Not like you, Z.”

“I don’t believe you, Harry! You’re such a big star. People would laugh just to get your attention. Anyway, I don’t get my moods as often, but no one can jolly me out of one of them,” Zayn admits. “No one but you ever could.”

Harry wants to touch him, wants to brush back the lock of hair that has fallen into Zayn's eyes, wants to rub the backs of his fingers against Zayn’s stubble the way he used to.

Apparently, he twitches, because Zayn smiles at him. “Did you almost rub my face, Haz? I saw your fingers. Remember how you would do that during interviews? God. We were like puppies, all over each other, all of us. I miss that closeness. I didn’t know I was losing it forever when I left.”

“Have you talked to Louis?”

“Nah. You know how he is; he holds a grudge with the best of ‘em. And I’m too stubborn to be the first one to break, as you rightly noted in that song of yours.”

“You listened?”

“Of course I did. I tried to work out who you were writing about. I reckon that was my song, yeah? At least partly?”

“Not just that one, but yeah. I thought maybe you would call me after that.”

“You know how I am, Haz. I wanted to, but I’m my own worst enemy. Gigi had me in therapy for a while.” He chuckles a little at that. “It wasn’t that bad, actually. I probably learned a bit from it. But it didn’t keep me and Gigi together. She’s like you, babe, loves the bright lights and big cities.”

Harry smiles, warmed by the endearment and wondering if he should start therapy too. Maybe it would help him deal with this ache in his heart that nothing seems to touch. He’ll think about it later after Zayn explains himself.

“Is that what you think of me, Z? I couldn’t make it without all the attention?”

“I didn’t say that, but isn’t it true?” Zayn leans forward and gives Harry his most level gaze, expression serious. “I never asked you to go with me, did I, because I knew you couldn’t. I wanted to ask, Harry. I…” He trails off, looks down long enough that the velvet of his lashes makes Harry long to feel them against his fingertips, before he finally looks at Harry again. 

“I told you I would finish the tour, that I would wait for you, and then just, I couldn’t wait any more. I wasn’t trying to get a jump on my solo career. I know that’s what you thought. I know it is, Haz. It’s what I might have thought, only if you had left we would have had to stop. By that time it was Harry Styles and One Direction.” His smile is only slightly bitter.

“I listened to bad advice, Z. I had people telling me the band was holding me back. More like you were holding me up.”

“We were stupid.”

“Yeah, we were.”

Zayn smiles suddenly, the big Zayn smile that makes his nose wrinkle. “We’re so fucking wise, Harry! Look at us grownups!” He springs up from his chair. “C’mon, then, let’s make breakfast. I can cook now--you can just watch me and criticize my technique.”

“I’d never criticize you, Z.”

“_Harry._ I know. Let’s not be so serious. We’ve not seen each other in ages. I want to know why you thought you needed to take your top off for _ Rolling Stone _ last fall and who you’re dating. I want to hear why you feel sad, but not now. Let’s catch up, yeah? Call your driver and tell him you’re spending the night. He can come get you in the morning.”

Harry can’t help it; he never could with Zayn because he still believes that under everything Zayn is the best person he ever knew. He smiles. “Yes, please, Z. I’d love a sleepover.”

He pauses to let Zayn get a step on him, so he can open the door whose hinges need oiling, and so he can notice that Zayn has a bum now—imagine!—but still the narrow waist and elegant proportions.

He hopes briefly as he follows Zayn inside that _ sleepover _ still means what it used to.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you're like me, something like this is a dream you have, just that they mend fences, so to speak (sorry for the farm cliche), and then maybe later they realize that they have Feelings, and then later they are in love and making literal music together. Coming soon: same scene from Zayn’s POV.


End file.
